As I'm sure you know Pete, this is a more subtle point than the question suggests. 'Giving up' a bit of safety is, um, a leading way of putting it.
I might argue that no piece of electrical equipment is 100% safe. If nothing else many of them are heavy enough to pose a risk of injury if they were to fall onto their owner or if he/she were to lift them carelessly. Of course the risk of that is usually very, very small indeed and I, for one, am usually prepared to accept it. But I could have bought the kit from someone who wasn't prepared to accept it and who had replaced, say, the transformers in a power amp with smaller, lighter ones to make it safer. Indeed he would have made it (a tiny bit) safer and he might have compromised the sound quality in the process. So would I leave it in the condition in which he sold it to me, or would I 'give up' the safety improvement he'd made in return for getting some bass response back ? In the end it always comes down to judgement. For example, if I was running a valve amp in a public place or in a home where it might be accessible by children/pets/drunks then I'd want a valve cage on it. If I was running it in my home (no kids, no pets, only occasional drunks and even then not likely to mess with the electrics) then I'd quite happily run an amp which didn't have a valve cage. And I'd use a 2-pin Bulgin connector for the mains (with appropriate additional earthing) and 4mm speaker sockets and a screw-in mains voltage selector if that's what the manufacturer had fitted. All of these would be regarded by some people as 'unsafe' by modern standards even though they were almost universally used with a negligible rate of injury once.
I would however think very long and hard before I reduced any of a manufacturer's safety features, not least because of the very negative effect that would probably have on my insurance.
Just my two penn'orth of course.
VB